Several days ago, Mozilla announced that it would pay developers and hackers $3,000 for every reproducible, critical security flaw found in its FireFox web browser. Yesterday, Google has announced that it will pay $3,133.70 for critical security bugs found in its Chrome web browser. Bravo to Google for their ability to sneak 31337 (eleet) into their bug bounty payout. Google’s pay-per-bug program looks like this:

The maximum reward for a single bug has been increased to $3,133.7. We will most likely use this amount for SecSeverity-Critical bugs in Chromium. The increased reward reflects the fact that the sandbox makes it harder to find bugs of this severity.

Whilst the base reward for less serious bugs remains at $500, the panel will consider rewarding more for high-quality bug reports. Factors indicating a high-quality bug report might include a careful test case reduction, an accurate analysis of root cause, or productive discussion towards resolution.

Although Dell has never appeared that enthusiastic about Google’s Chrome OS, the Texas-based company does have plans for the Google netbook OS. Amit Midha, the head of Dell’s South Asian division, told Reuters on Monday that Dell is in fact working with Google on the OS which is set to begin rolling out this fall. Although Midha wouldn’t get much more specific than that, it certainly seems possible that we’ll see Dell be amongst the first companies to release hardware pre-loaded with Chrome. As Midha put it, when it comes to Chrome, Dell wants to be “one of the leaders.” More →

The Chrome Team is welcoming two more platforms out of beta, as both the Mac and Linux versions of the browser have officially shed their beta tags. The new, stable releases add several features, such as preference syncing and HTML5 compatibilities (geolocation APIs, app cache, web sockets, and file drag-and-drop). The Chrome team also posted a quick note about Flash:

In recent weeks, we’ve been beta-testing Adobe Flash Player integration into Chrome. While Flash Player integration in the browser is not included by default in today’s stable release, we’re excited to enable this feature with the full release of Flash Player (version 10.1) soon.

Head on over to the Chrome download page if you are interested in trying out the new code…and do let us know what you think! More →

Today at I/O 2010, Google announced the Chrome web store for apps. To debut later in the year at an unspecified time, the Chrome web store will allow users to install web-based applications that will run in native code such as Flash. Some of the applications featured in live demos included Dark Room, Plants vs. Zombies (it looked awesome), and Lego Star Wars. Google also announced it will be brining magazines to the Chrome web store. Sports Illustrated was on stage and showed off a pretty slick looking example which included slideshows, videos, live scores and more. Feature-rich advertisements were also shown off.

The London-based IBTimes is claiming to have, under good authority, the specifications of the yet released Google ChromeOS netbook — and the specs… well, they look pretty darn good. Powering the inaugural ChomeOS offering will reportedly be an ARM CPU and a chipset from NVIDIA’s Tegra line, combine that with a 10.1″ TFT-HD display (with multitouch), 2GB of RAM, 64Gb SSD, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, some flavor of cellular 3G connectivity, and a sub-$300 price tag and you have yourself a pretty nice little package. Now, we’re a little skeptical about a multitouch display on a netbook but hey, we can always hope right? Let us know if these rumored specs tickle your fancy in the comments.